Filthy Casuals

The only reason why a casual/hardcore divide exists at all is because the day-to-day roleplaying of Arm is boring and shallow. Everything fun revolves around PvP or RPTs, which means that casual players get excluded from the good stuff. This is not by design, by the way. Nothing in the code mandates that people RP this way. Historic staff leadership has been narcissistic, and current staff leadership either has not been able to or has not been interested in amending that.

No, all of the staff involvement I've seen focuses on high power events and "elites", rather than casual players. That's what I just said in my post. There's nothing mechanical in the code that forces the hardcore/casual divide, its the way that staff have shaped the culture of the game in the past. Traditionally they focus on fostering a top-heavy culture, which drives the players to grind and twink so that they can have an impact on the world.

If staff allowed good roleplay (and dedicated roleplay) rather than good stats to influence the world, things wouldn't be this way. And there would probably be much less fretting about how characters don't play like they're authentic people in the game world. That play doesn't get rewarded and being the exceptional badass does.

I laughed, but this is really true. Most of the RPTs I've seen have either been that, or "there's this guy and he's really good at stuff and all these cool things happen to him" that most players get to watch from afar. Really, just revisiting basic antagonist types could do a lot to spice up the RPTs and staff interaction with the world.

I started to say "Go Fish" but then I realized there's probably forums dedicated to Go Fish strategies and both world and regional competitions, shown on ESPN 8 "the Ocho".

This is sometimes where I come from. People are way too combat-centric and forget that this is a ROLEPLAYING GAME. More to the point of its classification than current RPGs with their 3d-based model and focus on combat/gameplay centering around combat.

Armageddon is about player interaction, with emotes and chatter- more than it is for hack and slashing. Though, this is where a huge disconnect occurs. People think the game-code and the combat that results, is just as 'roleplay' and 'IC' as emoting out your combat- which is isn't. Roleplay is the best, when you can engage in a long combat scene with another player, occasionally engaging with the kill command before typing disengage to roleplay it out some more. This can be enforced more with an 'engage' command where even during this on and off fighting, players are unable to regen any HP (which is why people don't do this method of roleplaying combat for fear of dragging it out perpetually), in order to give this ample breathing room for a huge fight.

As it is? You either need to have 125wpm+ in order to maintain this standard of emoting with your combat, or have preset emotes already prepared for your fight- otherwise you're going to either swamp or be swamped by your opponent before you can actually even roleplay any of the greater details, especially if they are the pvp-griefer types that just engage without any prior roleplay.

i don't think anybody is suggesting that a casual player have an advantage over a fanatic player

also there are loads of games out there that aren't glorified skinner boxes where you can win by virtue of grinding your dick off and having an edge because your numbers are slightly higher than your opponent's numbers